You’ll lose your job, your career, and everything you’ve planned for your future professional life.

You will be fired and then you’ll struggle to land a role.

Your network will prove useless, and you’ll finally wonder, “WHAT the heck is going wrong!”

Unless…

Unless you start working on a key set of habits, distractions, perceptions, and behaviour. You’ll need to let go of your sense of false pride in the workplace and give new meanings to your old ideas.

To sum it up – in order to grow your career as tall as you dream of, you’ll have to reinvent yourself, starting with some counterintuitive ideas.

Here’s a stage-wise breakup of everything you’re doing wrong in the office, and what you can do to change these intolerable habits.

Stage-1: Above-average illusion above average

Most employees consider themselves above average, which is statistically impossible. But before I even begin explaining this, let’s look at a couple of well-established cognitive and psychological effects.

The Downing effect – People with a below-average IQ consider themselves to have a higher IQ.

The Dunning–Kruger effect – Persons of low ability mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is.

These effects have been established based on hard evidence. So, there’s no room to refuse them as just another random study. That’s why it’s confusing for you to match your performance evaluations with your own views on performance.

Simply put – you rate yourself higher than you actually are at every skill, knowledge, and competence.

How about you stop doing that? It’ll take a lot of conscious thinking and brain training, but it can be done. That is, of course, if you’re not planning to get fired

Stage-2: Biologybiology

You work on visual cues more than anything else. Don’t you believe more in what you see yourself than a casual hearsay? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

We’re designed to look outwards more than inwards.

So, it’s obvious that you’re unable to see the faults inside. You calculate, analyse, measure the readily available data – the visual evidence. But analysing your instincts, your judgements and your behaviour are slightly harder to do. So, you don’t do it all.

In any case, as your work responsibilities increase, you’ll need better skills to avoid career-harming habits and perceptions. Getting fired is the least of your worries if your thinking is keeping your growth stuck

Stage-3: Denialdenial

Next step is when you’ve looked and finally identified your behavioural issues. But even then you find it difficult to accept your shortcomings when managers, bosses or even coworkers point them out.

Perhaps you picked this bad quality from a senior colleague. But don’t forget what old-timers of a company say isn’t always the right road to take. That road sometimes leads to you getting fired too. Just saying.

You need to be extremely selective when picking up qualities.

This is a shortcoming new employees learn too late – lack of professionalism makes them an easy target for influencing.

News flash: If you can’t own your mistakes, you can’t work on them. So, fired or not, start owning up your stuff

Stage-4: Blameblame

Once we deny anything wrong with us, we start pointing fingers. After all, the problem is still out there; so, someone must be responsible for it.

Additionally, shifting blame helps you live with your conscience. It keeps the stress out. And isn’t that what everybody is running after? To de-stress their lives!

Guess what?

If you keep shrugging off ownership, your manager will take note pretty soon.

And you’ll be out of a job then. You’re not only poisoning the culture, you’re making it hard for your boss to hold someone accountable – and that’s a sin, to extend boss’s workload.

Stage-5: Unwillingness to change

Often, you acknowledge you’re at fault at some point. Still, you don’t look deep down to change the habits or behaviour.

You just look for an instant cure that patches up that particular problem and move on.

Or sometimes you even admit your fault and start working on your inadequacies. But, you lose track of it in the middle. Just like forgetting to wake up early for days in a row.

Or maybe daily efforts necessary to bring about a solid change prove too much to follow through. Just like you drop going to the gym a week after signing up

Conclusion

At last, I’ll leave you with a few pointers that apply to ace any job and overcome a poor workplace habit.

First, get some focus and positivity in life. Find a purpose and a mentor to help you along the way. Then go out and get some training. And finally, start hanging out with those employees whom you highly regard – a good circle will do half your work.

Note: And if nothing works, at your current job, maybe it’s time to find a new one that better suits your personality and skills. For that, drop by here, where tons of companies with vibrant cultures are waiting to hire a great fit.